Sufi parable | I will lift up mine eyes | Zen | Dover Beach | Divine Love | Jesuit prayer | Song of the Broad-axe
Love bade me welcome | Silent Noon |  Congruence | Clouds | Why?

 

In the vault of night Shooting stars trail silently Before they vanish.   A haiku inspired by sleeping out under the stars on As Sifah beach.

Miss Hulland was my first English teacher in secondary school.  I was 11.  She was less than 5 feet tall (less than 160 cm for those using metric units), wizened with wispy, iron-grey hair, unflinching hazel brown eyes and two protruding front teeth which seemed to be all that she had other than some munchers in the lower jaw.

I feared her.  Nothing was ever right, and after I once wrote an essay which earned me an A grade, I had the temerity to write a short romantic love story which she deplored as unthinking and which got me a grade D.  She only ever gave me one grade A.

She introduced us to Shakespeare.  She allocated parts with considerable impartiality and made sure that you had to stay awake by suddenly choosing someone else to take over.

In the first year, she made us construct Common Place Books, and I still haven't worked out why it was called that.  This is my common place book, a collection of poetry and music which I particularly like and which has the unity of religious, particularly mystical, meaning.  I would like to think it displays the different faces of Love.

Why mysticism?  My personal opinion is that the most profound mysticism, which is found in all religions and which I believe to be centred in human psychology, comes closest to realizing the essence of the divine within the human.  It is paradoxically impersonal. 

 

	A Sufi parable	a story from Islam taken from The Little Book of Sufi Wisdom by John Baldock.  ISBN 1-85230-717-X
	I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills	Psalm 121 from the Old Testament to a musical setting by John Rutter
	Zen	it is and it isn't
	Dover Beach	poem by Matthew Arnold and music by Samuel Barber
	Revelations of Divine Love	Julian of Norwich - a renowned English mystic of the 14th century.  Music by Hildegard of Bingen.
	A Jesuit prayer	turning contemplation into action
	Excerpts from Song of the Broad-axe	poem by Walt Whitman with music by Eric Satie
	Congruence of thought	everyone knows how to create their own heaven or hell
	Why?	A saying from the Powhatan people of North America.  Music by John Tavener
	Silent Noon	a hymn to erotic love by Dante Gabriel Rossetti set to music by Vaughan-Williams
	Love Bade Me Welcome	an intensely religious poem by the metaphysical poet George Herbert set to music by Vaughan-Williams
	Satan	my views on the identity of Satan with reference to William Blake, C G Jung and the Bible

Music is integral to several of these pages.  Download the free RealAudio player if you don't have it already.

 

Treading the boards

performances by Muscat Amateur Theatre and Cantamus.

And now for something completely different Well, as the man says in the crucifixion scene at the end of Monty Python's Life of Brian, life is absurd.  The webmaster of this site has put masses of Monty Python sound clips together.  Heed his advice, and download the MPEG Layer-3 Audio Codec from his faq page to hear them.  Hint:  you have to scroll down the page a bit.

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Please note, all photographs on this website are copyright of Sue Hutton, unless otherwise stated.

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